Rate Your Sessions Level of Difficulty BEFORE It Starts…Here’s Why!

By Michael Wilkinson
Managing Director, Leadership Strategies

Over my twenty-plus years as a facilitator, I estimate that I have personally led well over 500 facilitated sessions. Over that time, there are three sessions in particular that I wish I could do over or at least have the Staples “Easy” button!

In this particular session, I was facilitating a highly volatile community and political issue. This major urban area was being fined $20,000 a day by their state’s environmental protection department for exceeding the limits of a restricted substance in the treated waste water the city was returning to the waterway. The city treated water from three treatment plants. After an extensive study, the city concluded that it would be significantly more cost effective and politically expedient to upgrade only one of the three treatment plants and build tunnels to transport the waste water from the other two plants.

The one plant that was chosen to be upgraded was located in a predominately African-American community. The tunneling and the size of the upgrade required to accommodate the processing from all the plants would have a significant impact on this community. The two other plants, located coincidentally in Caucasian communities, would be minimally impact. As you can imagine, this plan was met with significant outcry. Activist in the African-American community insisted that no tunneling be done and that instead each plant be upgraded.

To address the outcry, the mayor of the city named a panel of approximately 20, which included citizens from each community as well as engineers and city planners. They gave the team a facilitator (me) and a deadline for reaching consensus on an alternative to either tunneling or upgrading all plants. Tensions were high and trust was low. So to keep the process open, the city televised the meetings over cable and permitted an audience to sit through the proceedings.

It was a circus! It was overwhelming trying to manage the session, the process, the committee, the audience, the charts, and so on. At one point, two of the citizen members would have come to fists had it not been for my swiftly stepping in as the distance between them had closed to a couple of feet.

I was in way over my head and didn’t know why.

Our Scoring Model

At Leadership Strategies, our client relationship managers work hard to match facilitators with the specific needs and budget constraints of our clients. While some sessions are fairly basic and can be handled by our facilitator specialists, other sessions are much more complex and require not one, but two of our most senior facilitators. So, how do our client relationship managers know when a session is highly complex? How do they know when a session calls for one or more senior facilitators?

The following rating model provides a guide for defining the difficulty of a session. The model uses four dimensions and defines basic versus complex conditions for each dimension. One point is assigned whenever a dimension is complex.

Translating the Rating

Based on the rating, we recommend the following guidelines for assigning facilitators:

As you can see from the model, a session that has three or more of the complex characteristics requires two senior facilitators.  While one is facilitating the group, the other is carefully observing group dynamics and considering changes to the process to maximize the group’s performance.  Level 3 and 4 sessions can turn volatile quite quickly and, without a second facilitator, the session rapidly can get out of hand.

Knowing what I know now, here is how I would have scored the model.

I was alone trying to handle a Level 4 session! Knowing what I know now about rating sessions, there should have been two of our top facilitators working together to help the panel achieve its end.

By the way, the panel did reach consensus, but not to the mayor’s liking. The panel members all agreed that there were no solutions that would satisfy all interests and that the mayor would have to make the decision!

Interested in learning more facilitation techniques? Check out our course, The Effective Facilitator.

About the Author
Michael Wilkinson is the Managing Director of Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company, and a much sought after trainer, facilitator and speaker. He is a Certified Master Facilitator and a Certified Professional Facilitator. As a past president of the Southeast Association of Facilitators and a board member of the National Institute of Facilitation, Michael is a national leader in the facilitation industry. You can get more tips from either of Michael's books, The Secrets of Facilitation or The Secrets to Masterful Meetings. You can receive a signed copy through our website.

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